Active Fitness gains SensorCore integration, now counts steps and more

Last summer, Active Fitness joined the Windows Phone ecosystem. The app is a sister app to Winter Ski and Ride, our favorite app when hitting the slopes in the winter, and comes from the same development team. Active Fitness is an impressive app for staying fit, but today it gets even better thanks to some hardware found in newer phones. Rocking a Lumia 630? Then you'll want to try out the new SensorCore integration.

It was just yesterday that the SensorCore SDK was publically released to the Windows Phone development community, alongside an update to the Nokia Imaging SDK. Before yesterday, devs interested in trying out the SensorCore SDK had to request an invite.

By the looks of it Active Fitness is the first app outside Bing Health & Fitness that leverages technology from SensorCore SDK to count your steps on supported devices. It was just a few weeks ago that Bing Health & Fitness received the update, today Active Fitness gets in on the fun.

The update to Active Fitness, version 3.0.1.0, introduces the following:

Step counting (Thanks SensorCore!)

New weekly and monthly reports

Improved navigation

Improved user interface

New activities have been added, like horseback riding

GPS tracking has been improved

Do note: That you'll need new hardware with the Lumia Cyan firmware update to take advantage of the SensorCore technology. Right now, that's just the Lumia 630 available at retail. But devices like the Lumia 1520 and Icon will work with it too once they get the update. You can also add the Lumia 930 to that list once it becomes available. Basically Lumia Cyan + Snapdragon 4xx or 8xx processors will get you SensorCore.

We fired up the new version of Active Fitness on our Lumia 630 to check out the step tracking. Right now we only have Bing Health & Fitness to compare it to and will probably do a proper comparison between all SensorCore apps once a few more get released. First impressions show that it might not be as accurate as Bing or maybe it doesn't update as frequently. Again, we need to spend more time, but that's just a first impression.

Rocking a Lumia 630? Active Fitness is a free app for all your fitness needs (it's also a Universal Windows app). Take it for a spin and let us know what you think.